Online backup for home?

What are folks using for online backup? I am using Mozy right now and it is fine but it is around $15 a month. Looking at Amazon S3 it looks like I would pay about $6 for the same amount of storage.

I will say I have never had a problem with Mozy though so I don't want to switch to something less reliable.

So I figured I would go for the hive mind. What is best?

Legion likes Crashplan, that's what I'd recommend too.

I signed up for a trial of crash plan but it only gave me like 50 kilobyte per second!

I switched to Crashplan when Mozy raised it's prices (thanks EMC!) and it's been great. However, it *is* a trickle backup; it's designed to back up files slowly over a long time. So it'll take a few days for the first one to occur, then the updates are somewhat faster. Right now my status is backing up at 44.7KB/sec with 33,000 of 36,000 files done. It claims about a day remaining.

Crashplan is not for instant backups - get a DVD for that. It's for long term file storage and recovery (which does not occur at 50KB/sec lol, it's much faster) where it doesn't matter if backups take a few days.

I love CrashPlan. I've been using it for the better part of a year (backing up my essential stuff while Macrium Reflect backs up the whole lot locally) and my girlfriend recently got her own account to back up all her photos. It doesn't have to be a trickle backup though. By default, it only runs at full speed when you're away from your computer but you can adjust its bandwidth throttling in the options. I set mine to wide open at all times while it was doing my initial 80GB+ backup and now I have it set to use 50% of my upload while I'm at the PC and 85% while I'm away.

If you want a local backup solution, Reflect is the best option if you want to take a full image of an entire disk. If you want to back up only individual folders of essential data, CrashPlan can do that. It can back the stuff up to another folder or back it up to another machine on your local network. I make a second copy of my essential stuff to my work laptop which is quietly updates whenever both machines are on at home.

It might not matter if a backup takes days but in a week CrashPlan had barely done a percent of my drive so I'd be looking at well over a year for a complete backup. It's good to know that a restore is faster but it's difficult to trust that considering how slow the backup process is. Also, they offer a service where they will courier the data to you on a drive but naturally that is very expensive.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

It might not matter if a backup takes days but in a week CrashPlan had barely done a percent of my drive so I'd be looking at well over a year for a complete backup. It's good to know that a restore is faster but it's difficult to trust that considering how slow the backup process is. Also, they offer a service where they will courier the data to you on a drive but naturally that is very expensive.

Yeah, unfortunately in your case, they might just not have a data centre near Japan which is why you're getting such poor speeds. I would try to check the options for the software to see if it's throttling the speed but if it isn't, it may just not be a viable option there which is too bad.

JungleDisk was a recommendation from Legion et all I followed a couple of years ago and still use. Not good enough? Surpassed by competitors?

I'm very happy with crashplan for my laptop, it's a good set of suspenders to go with my belt of Time Machine backups. On my servers I use duplicity backing up to EC2 (easier to automate, more trouble to set up) and it works really well, too.

dejanzie wrote:

JungleDisk was a recommendation from Legion et all I followed a couple of years ago and still use. Not good enough? Surpassed by competitors?

Jungle Disk still works fine but the major advantage to CrashPlan is the ability to also backup to other systems on your network and that they're 100% unlimited bandwidth. Jungle Disk still charges for transfer and storage if I recall, though that can be better deal if you aren't backing up obscene amounts of data like I am.

I set up CrashPlan at home a while back and a full backup of my media PC took something like 2 weeks to complete. Now that it's done though, everything is great. Another thing to consider if the speed of the initial backup is an issue is that you can have CrashPlan send you an external drive for the initial backup. They'll send you a drive for recovery if you have a lot of data that needs to be rebuilt quickly as well.

I keep thinking about getting a family plan. Then I could set up a PC at my mom's house and back up both to the cloud and a computer I could drive to in a couple of hours. And I could back her stuff up to mine.

Wonder if you can pre-seed the other non-cloud PC and it recognize the files are already there? I was thinking I'd just put an extra drive in her PC.

I keep meaning to set up a family plan for CrashPlan for my wife and myself, but haven't got to it. I'm apprehensive about how long the initial backup will take—having whittled down the "If our computers and Time Machine drives burn, we must save these files" to just our Documents and Photos folders—and that's still looking like 230 GB between the two of us. Still, the sooner I start, the sooner it'll finish! o_O

And here's The Data Backup Thread (& request for more suggestions), where Legion drops some knowledge in the OP.

MannishBoy wrote:

I keep thinking about getting a family plan. Then I could set up a PC at my mom's house and back up both to the cloud and a computer I could drive to in a couple of hours. And I could back her stuff up to mine.

Wonder if you can pre-seed the other non-cloud PC and it recognize the files are already there? I was thinking I'd just put an extra drive in her PC.

I want to go this route myself. I have a friend a 1/4 mile away but I don't want to give him a system w/o encrypted disks. I am thinking bitlocker may be my out, provided the local password isn't hacked. The first replication is easy, just do the sync before I drop it in place.

What about Carbonite, only heard good things about that service.

I am giving CrashPlan a try since it so cheap. Now just 6 days till it is done uploading.

This one looks interesting to me...though I don't currently use any of their services: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

There's a promotion on right now for a free year of CrashPlan.

https://www.crashplan.com/carboniteswitcher/

Note, this offer is supposed to be only for those switching from Carbonite to CrashPlan. However, putting in any valid US email should work. I set up it up and it's working great.

They're using region checking good enough to block those from Japan at least.

Glacier is expensive restores (takes some time too if I remember correctly).
Crashplan is where I am leaning, on the free plan you can set up a disk/PC and do your initial copy. Everything is encrypted before it gets archived so if you don't give your friend the password your data 'should' be safe. After the initial copy take it over to the friends house and continue on.

More details here.

I signed up for the free trial for CrashPlan+ and I have to say I'm not too impressed so far. Was unable to connect at all this morning after installing the software. Filed a ticket and was told to restart my software. After a few tickets back and forth with me saying there's nothing wrong with my network they finally said they had to reboot the server and all was fixed. I was able to start my backup and it went for a couple hours before I wasn't able to connect. Filed a new ticket, was told that this time the server really was fixed this time and as of now I haven't been able to connect for the last few hours.

I'm pretty patient when it comes to tech issues and whatnot, but this is making me wary about depending on them for anything important on my home machines.

Stupid double post.

dejanzie wrote:

JungleDisk was a recommendation from Legion et all I followed a couple of years ago and still use. Not good enough? Surpassed by competitors?

JungleDisk was bought out by RackSpace and they are basically allowing it to die a slow death.

Also, S3 can be a very expensive way of backing up if you have a large amount of data. Crashplan is very aggressive in their pricing.

That said, I still love its mount-as-network-share feature and wish more backup services offered that.

I still have my JD account, but the time is now to start evaluating long-term alternatives, while JD is still operational.

Initial CrashPlan backup complete! Started August 31, finished this morning. 150 GB of docs and photos on two computers, going every night at 0.5 Mbps. Nice.

Somehow, I don't think that would be a very good solution for my 6TB server.

Malor wrote:

Somehow, I don't think that would be a very good solution for my 6TB server.

Oh, sure it would. Just expect to use the option to have them ship you a disc if you ever need the data

I'm currently mid backup on my WHS, but I'm not backing up ripped movies. So it's a bit over a couple hundred terabytes of pictures, music, and docs.

If it took 2.5 months to back up 150 gigs, it would take six or eight years to back up my server. Once.

1.5 months! You think I live in the dark ages here? Run it a full 24 hours a day and it could have been done in two weeks. Now you're looking at a year and a half. That's practically a blink of the eye, if in mid-blink you fell into a months-long coma.

Gravey wrote:

1.5 months! You think I live in the dark ages here? Run it a full 24 hours a day and it could have been done in two weeks. Now you're looking at a year and a half. That's practically a blink of the eye, if in mid-blink you fell into a months-long coma.

Yeah, I downthrottled my upload due to the Comcast cap and the fact that I was backing up my desktop at the same time.

I don't think this is really intended to back up every bit of data you have (pun!). Just the critical stuff, unless you live somewhere like Chattanooga or have Google Fiber.

MannishBoy wrote:

I don't think this is really intended to back up every bit of data you have (pun!). Just the critical stuff, unless you live somewhere like Chattanooga or have Google Fiber.

Yeah, that was the conclusion I came to as well. "Sweet, we can have online copies of our Time Machine backups... Well, maybe just our home folders... Err, maybe just the documents and photos then."